The Quinn Project
Note: This was my creative final for my Friendship in Literature class that yes, is a real class and I actually really enjoyed it!
Nearly every week we were discussing one of the following topics: can a boy and girl be friends? Can long distance friendships work? Can childhood friendships survive into adulthood? Can people who don’t fully agree be friends?
And as we kept revisiting these questions, I kept thinking that I simply had to share the story of my friend, Quinn, and I. Obviously we’re a boy and girl, we’re newly long distance and likely will be for the rest of our lives, we’ve known each other since preschool, and we don’t have a history of always getting along.
So, here’s a peek at the illustrated journal I created as well as my official preface, explaining the project and it’s inspirations (and yes, C.S. Lewis and Kim Possible somehow found their way into the same document):
The cover of the journal is has a drawing from each page of the journal. The title’s meant to capture how we’re best friends who share everything, our shared faith, and be a reference to a class reading.
In twelve pages, I sought to capture a lifelong friendship with one of my best friends.
I wanted to capture how we grew up together, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and how random and even tragic events led to one of the most unexpected, yet incredible friendships I have.
The unexpectedness of Quinn and I’s friendship is two-fold which inspired me to explore it through my creative project. Personally, we had drastically different personalities and interests, so it took a great deal of maturity and growth for us to become so close. In addition, our friendship would seem highly unlikely due to issues discussed in class such as cross-gender and long-distance friendships. However, despite all of these hurdles, Quinn and I are still best friends, rarely even addressing these societal issues.
My illustrated journal telling the story of Quinn and I’s path to becoming best friends proves that a cross-gender, lifelong, and long-distance friendship is not only possible but incredibly valuable.
The greatest issue that informs my project is cross-gender friendship.
The topic of cross-gender friendship has been prevalent throughout this course and few class readings have featured cross-gender friendships. In fact, many of the required texts condemn such friendships, as men from their respective times and cultures find women to be inferior and incapable of friendship.
For example, Michel de Montaigne concluded that women’s “souls do not seem firm enough to bear the strain of so hard and lasting a tie” (95). While this view is fueled by overt sexism more than any real psychology or experience, it still has been the general consensus for hundreds of years. Many writers and scholars were men steeped in cultures who valued friendship, but not women.
Even more modern writers have struggled to understand or support cross-gender friendship, with C.S. Lewis writing that when women are looking for friends “they don’t want us, for this sort of purpose, any more than we want them” (76). Lewis’s conclusion mirrors modern attitudes about cross-gender friendships more accurately than Montaigne’s as it exchanges sexism for a simple observation of human behavior. In Lewis’s view, and in many people’s views today, men and women do not really seek to be friends as they would rather be with those that they share more in common with.
These attitudes made me eager to use Quinn’s and my friendship for my creative project as it defies both of these ideas.
In addition, I wanted to explore a fully platonic cross-gender friendship that could never work romantically. By doing so, I could prove that even when men and women are friends, it does not necessarily have to end in romance.
While Quinn and I have occasionally wrestled with romantic feelings, it has never been at the same time or amounted to anything. Andrew Sullivan’s explanation of why he and his friend Patrick were not lovers echoes our same sentiments saying, “we would have been hopeless as lovers: far too headstrong to tolerate each other’s constant company, far too individual to have merged into one” (182).
Quinn and I have this same shared stubbornness and our personalities are so powerful and distinct, we would be terrible romantically. I tried to capture our differences and tendency to disagree throughout the journal, showing that we are best as friends. However, I also made sure to include notes of what I value about Quinn as my friend to show that we don’t need to be dating to be valuable to each other.
A second issue informing my project is concerns around long-distance friendships.
While Quinn and I did not start as long-distance friends, we are now and most likely will always be.
Several class discussions have explored the elements of long distance friendships as they are a common occurrence as one’s childhood friends go off to different colleges. This was the case for Quinn and I as I stayed home and he went off to Minnesota.
I was able to find research on long-distance friendships for my annotated bibliography. One study found that friends who communicated often and saw each other occasionally rather than frequently had highly satisfying and committed friendships (Brody). This means that long-distance friendships can be maintained and work through consistent communication.
In addition, it is actually better for the friendship when the pair only sees each other in person occasionally, allowing them to be more engaged and invested in these visits. I sought to capture this idea in my project and address how Quinn and I adapted to being long-distance while unintentionally following this study’s advice.
One of the greatest inspirations for my project was Kim Possible which features cross-gender best friends as the main characters.
Mark McCorckle and Bob Schooley, two directors and veterans of cartoon-making, invented the characters of Ron Stoppable and Kim Possible. Ron and Kim are childhood best friends and even though they eventually date, they remain friends for the majority of the show.
Not only did the cross-gender friendship inspire me, but the characters themselves mirror Quinn’s and my real-life dynamic. As I mention on the first page of my project, Quinn is the Ron to my Kim.
He’s like Ron in that he’s fearless, goofy, and caring while I’m like Kim as I tend to be over-achieving, calculated, and perfectionistic.
However, despite our differences, we deeply care about and often put each other over other things.
A great example of our cartoon counterparts would be the episode six of season one, “Bueno Nacho”, in which Kim and Ron end up working together at their favorite hang out place, Bueno Nacho. Not only does this mirror Quinn and my’s similar affinity for hanging out at fast food places, but also our dynamic. Kim and Ron work together and argue over their different approaches to things, which I mention Quinn and I doing until just recently in the journal.
However, even after Ron gets the job, he’s willing to leave it without hesitation when Kim’s in trouble and he has to go save his best friend. Ron and Kim’s ability to be incredibly immature one moment and then deeply caring and sacrificial the next inspired me while telling the story of Quinn’s and my friendship.
The writings of David Whyte also inspired me to explore the depth of Quinn’s and my friendship.
As I mention in one of the later journal entries, Quinn is the friend who knows me the most and yet still stays with me, who “knows [my] difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to [my] vulnerabilities more than [my] triumphs” (Whyte 71).
This line especially inspired me because I am most vulnerable with Quinn because he knows my faults, and vice versa. In my project, I wanted to be sure to capture both of our flaws and immaturities as we grew up, because that shared knowledge and willingness to admit our failings is what allows us to be such good friends now.
My main source of inspiration for the form of my creative project came from the cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar: The Last Airbender, created by long-time Nickelodeon animators Micheal DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, explores many friendships, especially those between the main character, Aang, and the other characters around him.
When the series starts, the characters are all young teenagers who play pranks just as often as they save villages, but as the series continues, the characters become older and the conflicts become more mature. The whole tone and look of the show changes as the characters mature, which was something I wanted to mirror as I explored Quinn and I growing up together.
The project’s form as a whole was inspired by cartoons like Avatar with visuals and dialogue. I also decided to use handwritten journal entries, capturing that season of our lives instead of dialogue because I wanted that blend of the written story with images that bring that season to life visually.
The way I drew us also was meant to mirror our growth, as our child selves were drawn more crudely and doodle-like, while I tried to be more polished and realistic with our grown selves to visually mirror how we and our friendship matured.
The beginning of my illustrated journal lays the foundation of Quinn’s and my unusual but constant friendship. I used the title “To My Soul’s Friend” to echo Whyte’s idea of friends knowing the depths and souls of each other. Also, Quinn and I not only met in church but share an equally devout faith, so that added to the meaning of him being my soul’s friend.
In the first few pages of the journal, I sought to explore how we did not initially plan to be friends, but just happened to be around each other. I also tried to establish how we laughed, disagreed, and teased each other as we grew up by discussing and drawing us doing exactly those things.
The drawings throughout the journal serve to bring a certain season of our friendship to life. Some, such as the drawing of us as Cubbies, him doing karate hands, us in our swimsuits, and us on the Strip, are based off real photographs, while others such as us at camp, at Wet ‘n Wild, him at Ben’s funeral, and us at the airport are based off specific memories in my mind.
I wanted to explore a mix of actual memories with images that captured the tone of that season so I could focus on our friendship as a whole rather than just a slideshow of iconic memories.
I also tried to use our facial expressions and details around us to give more detail, such as Quinn’s giddy expression on page six, my judgmental glare on page five, or the scattered items around Quinn on page eleven. I was largely inspired by cartoons such as Kim Possible and Avatar in my artistic style, as I tried to keep the drawings colorful and semi-realistic, but also cartoon-ish.
Specifically the elements of page eleven, which explores our friendship now, highlight our long distance friendship.
I drew the image of me driving and talking to Quinn to mirror the drawing on the page before, showing how we still talk in the car for hours even if we are not physically together.
Additionally, I drew Quinn and myself more physically close in both the airport and Strip scene then in any other drawing, with the exception of the hug on page nine. The varying distances between Quinn and my characters were meant to illustrate how close we were during that season, such as the “room for cooties” on page four versus our nearly touching shoulders on page six. So, this physical closeness on page eleven is meant to reflect how close we are even though we are usually a long-distance friendship, proving Brody’s research results even without us meaning to.
In later pages of the journal, I utilized more references to literature. On page nine, which explores the events and aftermath of Ben’s suicide, I included a direct reference to Sullivan’s discussion of how the death of a friend makes one realize the importance of friendship and life in general, as it “makes mortality real” (180). Also on page eleven, I wrote “We’ve learned to share our souls” in big, bold ink to once again echo the ideas of Whyte in how friendship is a connection of the deepest parts of each other. Finally, my closing remark on page twelve is “May I always seek you with hours to live” which is meant to be an application of Kahlil Gibran’s line in his poem “On Friendship”.
This last literary reference encapsulates how Quinn and I now have to actively seek each other to remain friends, and not just because we are bored or for entertainment, but so that we can share our lives and encourage each other to have the best lives possible.
Through my creative project, I wanted to tell the story of Quinn’s and my friendship to prove that friendships like ours are possible. Quinn and I rarely discuss how unusual or rare our friendship is, because we just are. He’s referred to me as his best friend, but through this project, I had the full realization that he’s my best friend as well. I wanted our story to be a testament to the value of pure friendship, even when romance or kinship often seem like a natural next step.
I wanted our story to show that this is possible and stand as almost an ultimate testament to the value and goodness of friendship, despite differences, growth, change, gender, or distance and that it’s worth pursuing even when it is hard, takes effort, or has no bigger purpose than just sharing your life with each other.
